The Sphinx by Graham Masterton

simply
said, “I can’t.”
    He didn’t know
what else he could do to convince ten They stood side by side on the sunlit
sidewalk until the doors of the Franco-African Bank were unlocked from the
inside and opened, and then she touched his arm just once and walked in,
    “Lorie,” he
said as she went.
    She paused, but
didn’t look back.
    He knew what he
wanted to tell her, but he didn’t have the words to explain what he felt, so he
just turned away and walked off down K Street, his hands jammed in his coat
pockets and his head bent. The girl the upswept glasses tittered as he went off,
until the girl with the gum said “Ssshhh,” and hurried her into-the bank.
    He didn’t
really surprise himself .when he finally came to the conclusion that he was
going to have to sneak over the wall of the Semple estate and check the place
out. It was the kind of blunt, straightforward thinking that had won him his
job with the State Department, and particular favor with the Kennedy camp. His
answer to every sensitive and puzzling diplomatic dilemma was to “get straight
hi there and find out what the hell’s going on.”
    He was an
uncomplicated thinker, but he was also a methodical man with a talent for
detail, and he reckoned he could execute a one-man commando raid on the Semple
estate with such precision that he could get in and out of the grounds without anyone
ever knowing he was there.
    All he wanted
to do was look over the house and the ground and hopefully gather one or two
clues about Lorie Semple’s stubborn insistence that any kind of romance between
them was out of the question.
    Ever since
Monday morning, Lorie had become an increasingly alluring obsession. He knew
how adolescent his infatuation was, but there was nothing he could do to get
her out of his mind.
    He doodled her
name on his blotting pad, and even tried to sketch pictures of her face. And
what made it worse was the way that her words kept coursing through his mind. /
want to tell you that you’re one of the most attractive men I’ve ever met, I
like you more than you’ll ever understand.
    “You,” said
Maggie, setting a styrofoam cup of coffee down on his desk, “have got it bad.”
    “Got what bad?”
he said.
    “The dreaded
Lorie Semples. A disease known to modern medical science as rampant puppy love.
That’s what.”
    He sipped his
coffee and scalded his lip.
    “I deny it
categorically,” he told her. “And apart from that, how can anyone of thirty-two
suffer from puppy love?”
    “Don’t ask me,”
she said with a shrug. “Just ask the person who wrote Lorie Semple twenty-four
times of your best blotting paper.”
    “You expect me
to use that cheap purple stuff, for her!”
    Maggie sat down
and leaned confidingly on his desk. “Come on, Gene,” she said quietly, “why
don’t you admit it? I haven’t seen you like this for years.”
    He sipped some
more coffee.
    “All right, I
admit it. She’s stuck in my mind and I can’t get her out. It’s the ridiculous
way that she says she likes me, and at the same time says we can never go out
together. It’s driving me crazy, if you must know.”
    “What are you
going to do about it?” she asked.
    He sat there
for a while, drinking his coffee in quick, burning mouthfuls, trying to make up
his mind whether he ought to tell her or not. In the end, he decided in favor.
Maggie’s thinking was always level and logical, and always sympathetic, too.
    “I’m working
out a plan,” he said slowly, “I want to break into the Semple estate.”
    Maggie sat
back. “You’re working out a plan to .do what!”
    “Maggie,” he
said, “I’ve got to know. Breaking in there, finding out for myself, that’s the
only way. I’ve got to see what it is that makes her so reluctant, t mean, maybe
it’s her mother. .Maybe the old girl’s crippled, and Lorie doesn’t want to get
herself involved with anyone who’s going to take her away from nursing her.”
    “Gene, you’re
out of your mind.